The Furman family, The Furman Company, and the university that bears their name are deeply linked to the growth and development of the city of Greenville.

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Due to the economic depression, The Furman Company’s financial interests suffered from 1929 until 1939.

Beginning in 1939, according to The Furman Company’s own historical accounts, Alester G. Furman, Jr. discovered a highly profitable practice by working with textile mill companies to sell off their mill-owned village housing to mill workers. This business strategy allowed the company to grow and expand its operations.

1939 marked the first deed with a racially restrictive covenant (RRC) written by The Furman Company. The last identified RRC associated with The Furman Company was in 1952.

There is also evidence of beneficial business practices by The Furman Company during this time period, making its history complex and nuanced. 

In 1947, The Furman Company funded the construction of a school building in a Black community near the Piedmont Plant.

In 1950, a subsidiary of The Furman Company offered mortgages to Black homebuyers unable to secure loans from area banks.

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Alester G. Furman, Jr.’s name appears on 72 deeds with Racially Restrictive Covenants (RRCs) filed in Greenville County between 1939 and 1952.

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Of the remaining 1166 RRCs, there are three means of evidence to confirm their association with Alester G. Furman, Jr.

1. The deeds were for properties owned by textile mills that The Furman Company, according to its own historical account, claims to have handled the property transactions at that time.
2. The names of representatives on deeds for mill village properties appear on different deeds alongside Alester G. Furman, Jr.
3. The Furman Company utilized a unique racial syntax on covenants during the time Alester G. Furman, Jr.’s was its acting president: “That the lot above shall not be sold, leased, or released to any negro or person of negro blood.”

Although Alester G. Furman, Jr. is not listed as the official president during this time span, The Furman Company’s own historical account acknowledges that he assumed leadership responsibilities of the company in 1932.

Racist real estate practices of the past (like RRCs and redlining) are one of the primary historical drivers of the racial wealth gap that exists in the United States today.

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The original covenant for the lands for the downtown campus stipulated that they would be used only for educational purposes: in one case, the Greenville Academy for the education of boys and girls and, in the other, for the new Greenville campus of Furman University.

This original covenant was inserted by Vardry McBee, who donated the land for the women’s college and sold the land for the men’s college to the Southern Baptist Convention. 

In 1950, the Board of Trustees, with Alester G. Furman, Jr. as chair, authorized Clement F. Haynesworth to preemptively sue the surviving heirs of Vardry McBee to clear any restrictions on the deeds so that the lands could be rented or sold after Furman University moved its campus to a new location.

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These legal battles would ultimately be settled by the South Carolina Supreme Court.

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After its legal victory, with restrictions from the deed removed, Furman University signed a property agreement with The Furman Company to generate revenue from its former downtown properties by renting them and ultimately selling them. 

The removal of a restrictive covenant from a deed is a difficult legal challenge which requires significant resources; resources unavailable to the vast majority of would-be Black homebuyers in Greenville County in the 1940s.

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In 1913, Graceland Cemetery was founded just southwest of the city of Greenville, SC. 

Graceland Cemetery sits adjacent to the Freetown Community, one of the first communities in the county where Black families could purchase land and own homes.

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At its outset, purchasers of burial plots in Graceland Cemetery had to sign a deed with the two racially restrictive covenants (RRCs).

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The first:

The second:

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In 1918, Alester G. Furman, Sr. became president of the Graceland Cemetery Association with Alester G. Furman, Jr. initially named as one of its directors.

Graceland Cemetery, Inc., continued to insert RRCs in burial plot deeds until 1948, when the Supreme Court ruled them unenforceable.

In 1948, Graceland Cemetery, Inc was liquidated and its property acquired by Byron E. Reeves.

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The decision to move Furman’s campus away from downtown was officially decided by Furman’s Board of Trustees during a meeting in 1950.

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Although the story of why Furman decided to move has been framed as an inevitable response to overcrowding and a need to unite men’s and women’s campuses, there was actually a good amount of debate and discussion at that time about whether such a move was absolutely necessary.

Despite evidence of those debates and discussions, the collective memory of Furman’s move has settled around the one we most often tell today, thanks in part to a number of historical markers and plaques that have been strategically placed on the grounds of both the old and new campuses.

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The architectural design of the new campus marked an intentional effort to signal a continuity of culture with the old campus.

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Although the new campus included many modern elements, the constructed replica of the Bell Tower and the relocation of the Old College helped symbolize an attachment to Furman’s past.

Together, these architectural features functioned as “relics” and provided a visible way to secure the roots of its traditional culture in the wake of a socio-cultural changes taking place at the time on local and national levels.

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Furman’s move from its original location to its current site roughly 7 miles north of downtown coincided with a national phenomenon that urban historians call “white flight.”

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“White flight” generally refers to the movement of white households and institutions away from city centers to the suburban periphery in the decades following WWII.

When Furman University departed downtown, the neighboring population it left behind was 45% Black. At its new location, the population would be over 95% white.

Between 1940 and 1960, the supply of housing surrounding the new suburban campus location grew 270% percent. 

Furman’s move occurred during an era of post WWII suburban development that was facilitated by the growth of a highway system that decentralized economic activity away from downtowns across America.

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The Furman Company and the owners of Judson Mill increased the value of all properties in the village near the mill by requiring homebuyers to promise to keep the community exclusively white.

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They did this by writing racially restrictive covenants (RRCs) into all available property deeds in the mill village between 1939 and 1948.

Ironically, those same RRCs would eventually make Judson less resilient to the population effects of “white flight” decades later.

Had the properties not been embedded with racially restrictive covenants, it may have been more open to racial integration in the 1970s like other neighborhoods in the city of Greenville.

Had Judson Mill area been more integrated, it would not have suffered such extreme depopulation when the textile industry collapsed in the 1980s and white households began leaving the area.

After the mass departure of white households, Black and Latino residents began to move into the community, changing the racial composition of the neighborhood.

By the 2010s, a depopulated Judson with less expensive real estate relative to the city of Greenville, became a prime candidate for real estate speculation and gentrification.

Today, with renewed demand on housing in Judson, rents are rising and the Black and Latino residents who filled housing units left behind by white households that fled between 1980 and 2010 are now being priced out.

The primary cause of current racial displacement taking place in the Judson Community is the racial wealth gap in the US today.

The primary causes of the wealth gap in the US today were the racially restrictive real estate practices of the past (e.g. “redlining” and RRCs).

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